Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday May 3, 1910
New York, New York – Clara Lemlich and Fannie Zinsher, Heroines
From The Progressive Woman of May 1910:
TWO LITTLE HEROINES
From The Survey of January 22, 1910 —–
I have listened to all the speakers and I have no patience for talk. I am one who feels and suffers for the things pictured. I move that we go on a general strike.—Clara Lemlich at the famous Cooper Union meeting.
The spontaneous strike of 20,000 shirt waist makers in New York City was the greatest event in the history of woman’s work. The majority of the strikers were mere girls, few of them over twenty years of age. They had no “great” leaders, but among them were individualities strong enough and great enough to hold a place in the history of our country’s industrial development. Two of these were Fannie Zinsher and Clara Lemlich. The following from The Survey [“The Spirit of the Strikers” by Mary Brown Sumner] is a sketch of the lives of these two brave little girls:
I have two pictures of Fanny Zinsher in my mind, one as she came from Russia at fourteen, fleeing from persecution to free America, with round cheeks, smiling, irresponsible lips and clear eyes full of interest and delight in living; the other after five years of American freedom, with sad sweet eyes whose sight was strained by the flashing of the needle and by study late at night, mouth drooping with a weight of sadness and responsibility and an expression of patience and endurance far beyond her twenty years.
She came a little high school girl from Kishineff to San Francisco. She did not know what work for wages was, but she and her brother four years older had to turn to and support a mother and a little brother. Three hundred power-machines in one long room of the garment factory welcomed this little human machine-in-the-making. The roar and flash of the needles terrified her. She tried to work, but her nerves went more and more to pieces, her frightened eyes failed to follow her fingers as they guided her work and the second day she slit a finger open and was laid up for three weeks. When she returned she could adapt herself no better to the nervous strain. At piece work she could earn little over one dollar a week, until a kind forewoman removed her to a smaller room where in time she rose to five dollars.
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